


Librarian Trivia Madness Night at O'Leary's Bar and Grille

by JenyaKeefe



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Because librarians are always right, Bets & Wagers, College Student Stiles Stilinski, College is mostly not this fun, Competitiveness, Don't argue with librarians, Entirely fictional Los Angeles Bar, First Meetings, Flirting, Fluff without Plot, M/M, No Sex, PhD Derek Hale, Pick-Up Lines, Rated teen for language, pub trivia, trivia night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25369468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenyaKeefe/pseuds/JenyaKeefe
Summary: "We do not fuck around with easy trivia. There will be four themed rounds. No cheating, no phones, no shouting out answers, no collaboration between teams. And what is the number one rule?”“Don’t argue with librarians!” shouted Stiles, along with the other patrons of O’Leary’s Bar and Grille. Across the table from him, Scott and Kira laughed and fist-bumped.At the next booth was another team of three: a blonde in a push-up corset, a big taciturn brown-skinned man, and a gorgeous dark-haired guy with a body that didn’t know how to quit. Stiles gave them a neighborly grin; the blonde waved, her boyfriend nodded. The hottie gave them a judgmental look as the server brought them their round.Stiles didn’t know eyebrows could be that unimpressed.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 29
Kudos: 412





	Librarian Trivia Madness Night at O'Leary's Bar and Grille

“Are you ready for Librarian Trivia Madness?”

“Woo!” shouted Stiles, clapping and cheering along with the rest of the packed bar.

“Here’s how this goes,” said the trivia MC, a pretty woman sporting a polka-dotted dress, a Bettie Page haircut, and a lot of tattoos. Her name was Taryn.  “We are academic librarians,” she said, “and we do not fuck around with easy trivia. There will be four themed rounds. No cheating, no phones, no shouting out answers, no collaboration between teams. And what is the number one rule?”

“Don’t argue with librarians!” shouted Stiles, along with the other patrons of O’Leary’s Bar and Grille on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Across the table from him, Scott and Kira laughed and fist-bumped.

“That’s right! Because why?”

“Librarians are always right!” chorused the bar.

“This is fun!” said Kira, leaning over the table so that Stiles could hear her. “I’m intimidated!”

“Nah, we got this.” They’d already had cheeseburgers and a round of mojitos, and Kira was flushed with excitement and squeezing Scott’s hand. “Starts out pretty easy, gets harder as we go along.”

Taryn was saying, “Also, please remember to be good and generous to your servers. The winning team gets a free delicious appetizer, courtesy of O’Leary’s Bar and Grille - “ cheers - “and bragging rights for beating your UCLA Librarians’ Trivia Madness!”

The team of librarians cued up dance music on the sound system and began to circulate among the booths, passing out pencils and paper score sheets.

“Right,” said Stiles, rubbing his hands together and producing his lucky pen. “We’re going to  _ crush  _ this.”

He was being optimistic. His team was really not really up to Librarian Trivia Madness level. Kira and Scott were both smart people, but neither had the kind of brain that retained useless facts. Stiles  _ did  _ have that kind of brain, but only on certain topics. To win Librarian Trivia Madness Night you really needed a solid team of nerds, and that Stiles did not have. 

Still, he was in it to win it. He wrote their team name - P!nk Motel - on the top of their scoresheet (because the Pink Motel was a campy Los Angeles landmark, and he really liked P!nk, okay?) and gestured to a server for another round of drinks.

He, Scott, and Kira are chair-dancing to “Groove is in the Heart” when he caught the eye of the team at the next booth. It was another team of three: a blonde in a push-up corset, very nearly in the lap of a big taciturn brown-skinned man, across from a gorgeous dark-haired guy with a body that didn’t know how to quit. Stiles gave them a neighborly grin; the blonde waved, her boyfriend nodded. The hottie gave them a judgmental look as the server brought them their round.

Okay, what was with the constipated glare? True, they were not dignified: Scott was lip-synching “not vicious or malicious, just de-lovely and delicious” to a fork microphone, and Kira was whipping her hair. But they were college students having fun on a Saturday night. Stiles toasted the hottie with his tequila shot and knocked it back, and got a quirk of the eyebrows in return.

He didn’t know eyebrows could  _ be  _ that unimpressed.

“All right!” The song came to its end, and Taryn the Librarian was back at the mike. “Let’s get it started! Round One tests your knowledge of movie adaptations of books. Please -” her voice went librarian-stern - “Direct your attention to the screen. I will show a character from a movie. For one point, you will name the character. For a second point, you will name the book that this movie is based upon. For a third point, you will name the author of the book. Please keep in mind that the title of the movie might not be the same as the title of the book. Ten questions, a possible three points per question, with a maximum possible thirty points for the round. Are you ready?”

“Yeah, buddy,” said Scott. “We got this.”

They did have it. They cleared out the easy ones (Lizzie Bennett,  _ Pride and Prejudice _ , Jane Austen) without comment and pooled their knowledge to nail down the tough ones. Stiles knew that  _ Blade Runner _ was based on  _ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? _ by Philip K. Dick. Scott knew that Morgan Freeman’s character in _The_ _ Shawshank Redemption _ was named Red. The true star of this round was Kira, though, a lit major who knew Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Solomon Northrup. They completed all the blanks on their scorecard feeling confident.

“Please turn in your papers for scoring,” said Taryn. 

The librarians played more upbeat music while they scored the sheets, and Stiles was happy about their chances. He glanced over at the team at the next table, admiring the guy he had mentally dubbed their team captain: handsome, square-jawed, with dark hair and light eyes. He wore a soft green henley that clung to his torso, and sipped a beer from the bottle.

Stiles smiled at him. The guy gave a grave nod, and wasn’t he just as sexy as fuck? Stiles began plotting how to get his phone number just as Taryn began reading out the answers, and Stiles mentally tallied his team’s points: they’d guessed the author of  _ Hidden Figures _ was Rebecca Skloot, but it was Margot Lee Shetterly. Otherwise they’d aced it.

“Third place is Iggy Quizalea, with twenty points,” announced Taryn. Some girls in the corner whooped. “Then a big jump to P!nk Motel, with twenty-nine points.” Kira squealed. “And currently in the lead is Howliwood Boulevard, with a rare perfect score! Thirty points for Howliwood Boulevard!”

The corseted blonde at the neighboring table went wild, punching her boyfriend. Stiles met the team captain’s eyes. 

The guy smirked, and tilted his head in an unmistakable  _Aww, too bad_ sort of way.

Stiles narrowed his eyes at him. He instantly made a solemn vow: if P!nk Motel wasn’t going to win Librarian Trivia Madness, they were at least going to beat  _ that  _ guy’s team.

_ It’s on. _

Next up was a fill-in-the-blank the song lyric round. Stiles was feeling pretty good about it until it started. 

“Oh my God, what is this boomer bullshit?” groaned Stiles, clutching Scott’s arm. The Eagles? Lynyrd Skynyrd? “I crossed my old man back in _____, don’t take me _____” by  _ who _ now? 

“Do you know these songs?” Scott asked Kira.

“I’ve heard of Steely Dan,” she said, a little doubtfully. “I think my dad was mad when they won a Grammy instead of Beck.”

“They’re older than Beck?” despaired Stiles. 

He guessed  **the saddle** and  **seriously** , then looked over at the neighboring table. The blonde and her boyfriend were chatting, not paying attention, while their handsome team captain studiously and without hesitation filled in the blanks.

“We are so screwed.”

“Dude, don’t take it so seriously,” said Scott.

But Scott didn’t understand. Stiles was locked in mortal combat with the sexy henley-wearing beer-drinker at the next table, who certainly gave the appearance that he knew all the answers. “This is a classic rock nightmare,” he said.

Kira and Scott lapsed into necking while Stiles took his best shot at the 70s zeitgeist, filling in blanks randomly with words like  _ funky  _ and  _ Watergate  _ and  _ cocaine .  _

Considering his abysmal ignorance, he was shocked that P!nk Motel got nine points out of thirty; shocked anew that Howliwood Boulevard easily held its first place spot with a solid twenty-six points. “Yeah, Derek!” shouted the blonde, high-fiving her teammate, who had only missed lyrics from some band called Thin Lizzie, good Christ. Derek, the hottie, was laughing with pleasure, his eyes alight, and he was the most desirable thing Stiles had ever seen in his life. 

He was also beating Stiles with ease, and that could not stand. 

In the break before the next round, Stiles got up to use the restroom. In the hallway on his way back he encountered Derek.

“Hey, nice work with the dad rock,” he said. “It’s so good that you’re keeping your brain alert, even in your golden years.”

“Thanks,” said Derek, crowding Stiles up against a wall. They were about the same height, and while Derek was older than Stiles, he was  _ clearly  _ in his prime. “I was worried at first that no one here could give me any competition.” Stiles was so caught up in imagining himself tasting his beautiful mouth he almost missed his next words: “But those girls in the corner are pretty good. For  _ undergrads _ .”

“Oh,” breathed Stiles. “You did not just say that.”

Derek, so close to him that their noses were almost touching, gave him a wicked smirk, and then pushed off the wall and headed for the gent’s, leaving Stiles aroused and infuriated.

“Pretty good for undergrads,” he growled under his breath, returning to his seat. 

“Hey, you want to get out of here?” asked Scott. “We’re down by a lot, and it gets harder from here, right?”

“Noooo!” said Stiles.

He was saved from the necessity of further argument when Taryn the librarian announced, “The theme of Round Three is: Our Friend, the Periodic Table of the Elements. Oh, don’t worry. I know it sounds boring, but the head of UCLA’s Science and Engineering Library has worked hard to make sure this round is full of surprises.”

Stiles met Scott’s eyes. Scott smiled.

Stiles was pre-med, currently working on an independent project in myoelectric prosthetics; he’d already been accepted into the bioengineering program at Stanford. Scott was headed for UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in the fall. Between the two of them they had taken a shit-ton of chemistry. 

Stiles glanced at Kira, who was grinning. 

“Get ‘em, boys,” she said, because she was awesome.

He looked over at the Howliwood Boulevard table. The hottie’s eyebrows seemed less than pleased. He was not, perhaps, a science guy.

Our Friend the Periodic Table was satisfyingly hard, including little-known facts about organic and inorganic chemistry, and Scott and Stiles were on fire. P!nk Motel won the round handily: twenty-seven out of thirty possible points (damn you, N5-methyl-tetrahydrofolate). Kira squealed when the current rankings were announced: they were in second, exactly three points behind Howliwood Boulevard.

He grinned cheekily at Derek, leaning across the aisle to say, “Hey, you did really good! I mean, Librarian Trivia Madness is pretty hard. And O’Leary’s is a  _ college  _ bar, after all.” He winked. “It’s not all gonna be movies and Steely Stan.”

Derek gazed at Stiles levelly. “You’re still losing, college boy.”

“Oh, but I like my odds.”

“Round Four,” announced Librarian Taryn. “Are you ready for this game to get hard?”

Stiles dragged his eyes away from Derek to cheer, along with the rest of the customers.

“The theme of this round is 1935,” she said. “History, literature, politics, culture, science, sports, medicine, all having to do with the pivotal -” 

She became inaudible, kept talking for a moment before realizing that no one could hear her, frowned, and tapped her mike. The speakers crackled. The sound system switched over to “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo while the librarians clustered around their malfunctioning AV equipment. 

And ... P!nk Motel was in trouble. Stiles’s mind was filled with plenty of random facts, but he hadn’t exactly made an intensive study of the 1930s. Scott regarded anything before about 1992 as ancient history, Kira lacked competitive spirit. He stole a look at Howliwood Boulevard.

Stiles wanted to lick that smug expression right off Derek’s gorgeous face.

_ No way am I leaving Librarian Trivia Madness Night empty-handed .  _

He took a fortifying swallow of Scott’s drink, got up, and slid into the booth beside Derek, scootching close enough to press thighs and share body heat. “So,” he said. “You think you know something about the 1930s.”

“Well.” Derek didn’t back down, he just tipped his head modestly. “UCLA thinks so, or they wouldn’t have given me that PhD in twentieth century history and economics.”

Stiles could feel his face heating, not with embarrassment but lust. “Care to make a little wager?”

“You sure you wanna go there, college boy?”

“Oh yes doctor, yes I am. Loser makes dinner for the victor.” 

Derek’s voice was a growl. “So you’re backing down in hopes of getting a date?”

“I’ve never backed down from anything in my life,” said Stiles. 

“Testing, testing.” Librarian Taryn’s voice came over the speakers. “Can everyone hear me? As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, this round is all about the pivotal year of 1935.”

“Are we on, doc?”

“If only to take you down a peg,” said Derek. 

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” said Stiles. “I love Italian, and I’m allergic to kiwi fruit. Keep it in mind.”

He popped back over to his own table, grabbed his lucky pen, and nodded firmly to Scott and Kira. “Thinking caps on, comrades, my honor is on the line.”

“Did you just make a wager on 1935?” asked Kira, worriedly. “Stiles, I don’t know anything about 1935.”

“Win-win, baby,” said Stiles. “Win-win.”


End file.
